GRASS is Growing!!!

As we move towards the new academic year it’s a great time to reflect on another enormously busy Easter and Summer term for the GRASS team.

We started off, in March, with an interactive talk to colleagues in Agriculture (complete with donuts and squash) and another at the Henley T&L conference on the use of screen capture and video feedback.

I was then lucky enough to win both a national teaching prize-the Political Studies Association’s Bernard Crick prize…

Emma Mayhew PSA 2

…and a RUSU Excellence Award for technology, in part, because of my use of screen capture. The RUSU award gave me the opportunity to talk to 80-100 interested colleagues about video feedback at the annual T&L showcase in 3sixty.

We held the second of our termly ‘Lunch and Learn’ sessions in March which attracted 20 colleagues. This one was far more interactive so colleagues were encouraged to bring their own laptops and follow along. Many thanks to Richard Mitchell for sharing his experiences at this event.

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Building on this success the GRASS team were then invited to give short talks at another five School Board of Studies or School T&L Committee meetings to demonstrate how versatile screen capture technology can be and encourage even more use around the University.

As well as launching his new eye tracking project, David ran an interactive workshop at the IFP InForm conference in July and I presented at the major BISA conference in Tower Bridge-no mean feat in a conference room with absolutely no technology at all!!!

We’ve also been liaising with colleagues working on other new projects-both new TLDF funded projects and major new IT developments like TALIS and Grademark as we start to think about how screen capture can be used to disseminate information to our students on exciting new ventures.

Finally, do watch out for my first GRASS inspired peer reviewed journal article to be published in European Political Science in the next few months-‘Play-back feedback: the impact of screen captured video feedback on student satisfaction, learning and attainment’.

It’s been hugely busy but, as ever, hugely rewarding to be part of the project as we draw towards the end of our first year. I can’t wait for year two!!!